The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage

Sarah Baker, Catherine Strong, Lauren Istvandity, Zelmarie Cantillon, Sarah Baker, Catherine Strong, Lauren Istvandity, Zelmarie Cantillon

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315299297
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Media Studies

The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage examines the social, cultural, political and economic value of popular music as history and heritage. Taking a cross-disciplinary approach, the volume explores the relationship between popular music and the past, and how interpretations of the changing nature of the past in post-industrial societies play out in the field of popular music.

In-depth chapters cover key themes around historiography, heritage, memory and institutions, alongside case studies from around the world, including the UK, Australia, South Africa and India, exploring popular music's connection to culture both past and present.

Wide-ranging in scope, the book is an excellent introduction for students and scholars working in musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, critical heritage studies, cultural studies, memory studies and other related fields.

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FRAMING THE FIELD OF POPULAR MUSIC HISTORY AND HERITAGE STUDIES

Zelmarie Cantillon, Catherine Strong, Lauren Istvandity and Sarah Baker

At the end of 2016, the Victorian State Government in Australia announced the establishment of the Australian Music Vault, ‘a new exhibition space dedicated to sharing the story of Australian contemporary music’ (Creative Victoria 2016). The idea of an Australian popular music museum or hall of fame had been discussed for a long time, but the Victorian government’s desire to establish the state as the cultural leader in Australia, and to position Melbourne as a global ‘music city’, provided the impetus for funding actually being committed to this heritage project. A number of ‘patrons’ who were contributing to the funding for the institution were also announced, comprising long-time players in the Australian music industry such as Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum (music journalist and Australian icon), Michael Gudinski (owner of Australia’s most successful independent record label, Mushroom) and musicians Archie Roach and Kylie Minogue. Currently, the curators are working with pre-existing popular-music-related collections in Australian cultural institutions, but are also starting to collect additional resources, inviting the public to contact them with information about further possible acquisitions (Dwyer 2017).

The establishment of the Vault speaks to many of the key themes in this volume, as well as demonstrating why such a volume is necessary at this point in time. Australia is not breaking any new ground in creating this institution; if anything, the country has been slow to respond to the growing international trend of incorporating popular music into national discourses of history and heritage. The Vault comes, however, at a time when activities reflecting such a shift in Australia have been increasing; over the last decade scholarship on popular music heritage in Australia has covered a range of activities including the 2014 Melbourne, Music and Me exhibition focusing on Mushroom Records (Breen 2016); the naming of streets in the Melbourne CBD after musicians (Strong 2015, Strong, Cannizzo and Rogers 2017); television series on the history of Australian popular music (Homan 2017); and the memorialisation of country music’s past in the regional town of Tamworth, Australia’s self-proclaimed ‘Country Music Capital’, which has developed a range of heritage sites and commemorative practices to secure its position in the musical landscape (Martin 2011, Baker and Huber 2013). The recent flourish of scholarly activity on a diverse array of heritage activity occurring in Australia reflects the increasing positioning of popular music as central to individual, community and national identity, and a recognition that the artefacts associated with its past are worth preserving. It also reflects the increasing utility of popular music history and heritage as an economic driver. Beyond the Australian context, this is seen most prominently in a city like Liverpool, England, which has used its association with prominent musical figures to drive tourism and other cultural activities (see Cohen 2012, Brocken 2015, and also Chapters 13 and 38 in this volume). In Australia, similar activities can be observed in Tamworth.

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At the same time, the establishment of the Vault raises many questions about the processes by which decisions are made about what is included in an institution of this nature, and who gets to make those decisions. Definitions are an issue here: both ‘popular music’ and ‘heritage’ are highly contested terms, with no consensus even among scholars working in these areas. Defining popular music in different ways leads to the inclusion or exclusion of certain musical genres, eras or geographic locations (see Bruce Johnson, Chapter 2 in this volume). Heritage is increasingly recognised as having many different aspects, as the recognition by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) of the value of intangible heritage has demonstrated. In relation to popular music, Les Roberts and Sara Cohen’s (2014) highly influential work in this area has led to distinctions being drawn between heritage that is authorised (official), self-authorised (determined by authoritative voices in the industry or community) and unauthorised (on a more everyday level, or even anti-heritage), which allows for considerable subtlety in the analysis of the construction of the past of an art form that has always had an important bottom-up component. However, even Roberts and Cohen note that drawing a line between what is heritage and what is not is very difficult, especially with a category like unauthorised heritage. The Australian Music Vault has not (as yet) released a statement giving clear insight into what it sees as falling within its remit in relation to these issues.

That two of the Vault’s named patrons, Molly Meldrum and Michael Gudinski, represent an already well-mythologised story of what is important in Australian music raises questions about how much space the Vault will give to histories that stand outside, or run counter to, the ‘standard’ version that has been presented in books, television shows and the media. To what extent, for instance, will Indigenous Australians, or women, or musicians from outside Australia’s urban centres, be included in the Vault? These types of questions relate, of course, to all histories, and the answers are always highly political, reflecting who is given authority to speak more broadly in a society. As popular music is a cultural form that has been important to people from all walks of life, and which has been recorded and archived as often by fans and musicians as by historians or museums, ensuring the incorporation of a variety of voices becomes doubly important. Much of the academic work on popular music history and heritage to date has engaged with the multitude of ways in which fans have acted as keepers of history (through exhibitions, DIY archives, websites, Facebook pages, artwork and so on), and museums have been working to try to incorporate fans’ perspectives into exhibitions (see Leonard, Chapter 26 in this volume). By all indications the Vault will do likewise, but how this plays out when the institution opens will depend on many factors, not least continued political good will and funding.

The surge in community- and government-driven preservation activities that have emerged globally, as exemplified by the Vault project, has been matched by a similarly exponential growth in the subfield of popular music studies and critical heritage studies. The idea that popular music and its associated cultural trends could be considered an important aspect of history or heritage has required a paradigmatic shift in the thinking in the museal, curatorial and archival fields, and a reconsideration of who creates, writes and preserves histories, and the meaning of heritage to everyday people. This has led to increasing hybridity in the ways popular music history and heritage are dealt with by scholars all over the world.

The presence of the topic is evidenced in written work featured in devoted journals (Popular Music History) and to special issues of journals such as International Journal of Heritage Studies (Brandellero et al. 2014) and Popular Music and Society (Bennett and Janssen 2016). The proliferation of monographs, edited collections, symposia and conferences, and even educational courses, further corroborates the growing viability of the field in its own right (for example, see Inglis 2006, Lipsitz 2007, Reynolds 2011, Baker 2015, Cohen et al. 2015, Pickering and Keightley 2015, Roy 2015, Bennett and Rogers 2016). The purpose of the current volume is to bring together the broadening range of popular music heritage applications in a digestible format, one that scholars new and experienced in the field can dip into for the foundational and progressive ideas captured here in the early twenty-first century.

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Despite the breadth of research covered in this volume, there are still areas in need of greater attention. One such area is the intersection between class and popular music history or heritage. Certainly, the basis of many forms of popular music and related subcultures can be found in class struggles (e.g. punk, skiffle) or even class elitism (e.g. the hedonistic nature of 1980s dance pop). The development of these genres over time obviously had impacts on the continued generation of new musics, but also new forms of heritage communities. Although the influence of class is evident in much research in music sociology and the adjacent domain of cultural studies, the area is yet to receive adequate scholarly attention.

Similarly, despite increasing attention given to the importance of archival practices for the preservation, mourning and celebration of queer histories (see Cvetkovich 2003, Halberstam 2005, Bly and Wooten 2012, Kumbier 2014), little scholarly literature has focused on queer heritage in relation to popular music specifically. Exceptions include Withers’ (2014, 2015) work on The Women’s Liberation Music Archive; Eichhorn’s (2013) work on feminist collections focused on fanzines and Riot Grrrl; Reitsamer’s (2015) work on physical and online feminist music archives in Europe; and recent work by Cantillon, Baker and Buttigieg (2017) that speaks to the relevance of sexuality in popular music archives. Such literature is significant to broader heritage discourses in that it highlights the affective and (potentially) activist nature of archives, which can challenge the mainstream historical narratives and musical canons that have traditionally marginalised queer figures and pasts. While there is no chapter devoted to sexuality in this volume, Reitsamer’s analysis of popular music and gender in Chapter 3 incorporates a discussion of lesbian and queer music-making practices.

The volume is divided into five parts. The first three apply distinct lenses to our relationship with the past, demonstrating that different theoretical perspectives are needed, and that different understandings of the past will be developed depending on whether we take an approach that is about history, thinking about how history is constructed, heritage or memory. Part four explores the significance of specific institutions that have played important roles in retaining, exhibiting or redefining popular music’s past. The final part presents a series of case studies that give an overview of the diversity of activity in this area, with an emphasis on incorporating voices from outside the Anglo-American sphere.

Part 1: history and historiography

History is often thought of as the record of the past. It is by its nature considered to be rigorous, and to at least some degree objective: a reporting of the things that happened and when they happened. Historiography, on the other hand, gives us some insight into the processes that create what constitutes history. In the case of popular music, the gap between its rise and it being taken seriously as a subject of academic enquiry meant that many key historical narratives about popular music were established first through media representations. The chapters in this part investigate the history of popular music and its construction, with an eye to understanding whose voices have been included, whose have been left out or marginalised and what ideologies underpin the attribution of value to certain artists, scenes and genres.

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The part opens with Bruce Johnson questioning fundamental assumptions about the subject matter at hand. In particular, he challenges the often taken-for-granted lines that are drawn around what we think of as ‘popular’ music, arguing that there is a case to be made for the history of popular music being much longer, and wider, than we often understand it. There may be aspects of history – not only in terms of music – that we are denying ourselves access to by adhering to accepted definitions. The following two chapters pick up on this theme of challenging accepted histories by highlighting two areas where popular music histories have been lacking or contested. In Chapter 3, Rosa Reitsamer discusses how female musicians have been excluded and marginalised in popular music production and histories. She explores how, despite this under-representation in mainstream practices and discourses, feminist and queer online archivists are actively working to document and preserve women’s music-making as heritage, and to offer alternative narratives of popular music’s history. Nabeel Zuberi then turns our attention in Chapter 4 to the racial politics of popular music production, consumption, scholarship and heritage. Zuberi critiques how race has been dealt with in popular music histories (particularly in a US context), and considers the importance of phonographic and digital media technologies in transforming how we understand racialised history and heritage.

Bringing the importance of music to the foreground in Chapter 5, Richard Elliott examines the recent history of popular music – particularly in relation to sound recording and storytelling – through a musicological approach. In doing so, he identifies three key strands of musicological enquiry into popular music histories, differentiating between those that investigate scholarly concerns, phonography and creative practice. He makes the important point that simply listening to music of the past may not be enough to engage with it, without an understanding of the context in which it was produced. Ways in which we can understand such contexts are the focus of Chapter 6, in which Steve Waksman considers the emergence of ‘the historical turn’ in popular music studies, focusing specifically on examples from the USA. The chapter surveys some early historical accounts of popular music, as well as notable revisionist accounts that worked to reframe dominant understandings of the music industry and recording technologies,...